Five Star Trek captains, £29 to get in, £40 for a Captain Kirk autograph, £899 for an all-inclusive pass, 18,000 Trekkies ready to spend, spend, spend

Last month, 43 years on, at the Excel centre in London, 18,000 fans congregated to celebrate, revere, and worship Star Trek

Fan conventions like Destination Star Trek London - based on TV shows, films, computer games or comics - are becoming increasingly popular

In September 1966, the American TV channel NBC aired The Man Trap, the first episode of a new series, a sort of Western set in space, called Star Trek.

The heroes were Captain Kirk, the resourceful, slightly pompous captain of a space ship, and Mr Spock, who had green blood, pointy ears and could fell a man using a rather nifty ‘death grip’.

The series, no more than a moderate success, was axed after three years.

Last month, 43 years on, at the Excel centre in London, 18,000 fans congregated to celebrate, revere, and worship Star Trek.

‘Trekkies’ – some dressed in those familiar bodysuits, a Sixties TV producer’s idea of what astronauts might wear in the future – come in all shapes and sizes.

Four Asian girls, all sisters, all dressed in the body- suits, tell me they love Star Trek because their late brother introduced them to it.

An oldish woman tells me that, for her, it was always about Spock. Someone else says she loves it because her father loved it. He’s here, too. He’s one of the original fans.

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You pay £29 to get in for one of the convention's three days. That doesn't sound like much. But then, once you get in, you have to pay for everything - and everything is for sale (pictured: A stall holder dressed as Spock)

Trying the Transporter

Fan conventions like Destination Star Trek London – based on TV shows, films, computer games or comics – are becoming increasingly popular.

Dave Bradley, editor of sci-fi magazine SFX, says that if you wanted to you could go to a different convention every weekend.

‘Sci-fi and fan culture are becoming more mainstream,’ he tells me.

Here’s the deal. You pay £29 to get in for one of the convention’s three days. That doesn’t sound like much. But then, once you get in, you have to pay for everything – and everything is for sale.

If you want to pose for a picture with William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk all those years ago, that’s £40. If you want Shatner’s autograph, that’s an additional £40.

If you want the autograph of Patrick Stewart, Shatner’s successor as captain of the USS Enterprise, that’s £35.

As for the other captains, actor Scott Bakula’s autograph will cost you £30, while Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew are each £25. A Platinum Pass, which gets you everything, is £899.

People wait patiently in line. Autographs take three seconds. Over the course of three days, Shatner will pose or sign for an estimated 4,000 people, each time with the same calm half-smile.

Visitors from the Starfleet's North-West outpost

If you want to pose for a picture with William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk all those years ago, that's £40. If you want his autograph, that's an additional £40

Later, when I ask Rob Nathan of Media 10, one of the companies that organised Destination Star Trek, how much Shatner was paid to attend, he doesn’t give me an exact figure, but says the actor gets a split of his autograph and picture money of around 50-50. So that’s roughly £80,000 for three days of being admired.

Lesser characters sit at desks, grinning. Queues form in front of Brent Spiner, who played Lieutenant Commander Data, an android, in Star Trek: The Next Generation (£20).

Or Michael Dorn, of the same vintage, who played the reptile-faced Klingon, Worf (£25). Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, is not here. But plenty of others are.

Sometimes you see them, and assume they are fans trying to look like Star Trek characters. But they’re not. They’re actors. The way you can tell is that the actors are mostly not in costume.

There are also booths where you can buy items designed to display and preserve autographs.

One stall, run by Nick Hopkins, will sell you a polypropylene carry-case for £8, if you want to safely transport your autograph; and a handmade storage box for £42, in which you can hang your autographs, in their almost airtight protective plastic sheaths, like clothes in a miniature wardrobe.

‘This is what the Vatican uses,’ he tells me.

The organisers of Destination Star Trek understand that once you've left the building, there are only limited ways to spend money on Star Trek. That's why everything is for sale. That's why it costs so much

A few yards away, you can pay £15 to sit in Kirk’s seat from the bridge of the original Enterprise and have your picture taken.

It was designed in 1966, and it’s clunky. But that’s part of the charm. The queue is huge. Geeks in heavy-metal T-shirts sit in the chair. They pose and laugh, seemingly in on some great secret.

Then they move on. People line up to watch this action through a glass panel.

If you want, you can buy four glossy pictures of Star Trek characters for £10. There are mugs, too, for £6 or a Star Trek pizza wheel for £30 – all very nerdy, but sort of cool too.

Elsewhere there are postcards, T-shirts, bottle-openers and figurines of Kirk and Spock.

Convention Trekkies

The organisers of Destination Star Trek understand that once you’ve left the building, there are only limited ways to spend money on Star Trek.

You might want to watch it – but then you’ve probably got all the DVDs already.

That’s why everything is for sale. That’s why it costs so much. That’s why you can buy sweatshirts for £60 and Klingon masks for £89. There’s even a Christie’s catalogue, listing Star Trek memorabilia for an auction that happened years ago. That’s £49.

During the convention, each Star Trek captain gives a talk. I go to see Kirk and Picard – or rather, William Shatner and Patrick Stewart.

To listen to each talk, you’ll be charged £25. The auditorium is packed to its 2,500 capacity.

Shatner, now 81, walks onstage to a standing ovation. In fact he gets several.

He will answer questions, and riff on the answers. He is charming – self-deprecating and quite witty.

He says he admired two actors in particular: Olivier and Brando. He acted in Shakespeare plays, then he got this part – Captain James T Kirk. At the start, he says, NBC didn’t want Spock to have pointy ears.

‘It will alienate people – pardon the expression,’ says Shatner.

He tells us about playing Kirk when Kirk thinks he’s dying. He says Kirk goes towards death ‘hungry and thirsty’ for the afterlife.

Afterwards, there is an auction. Jason Joiner of Showmasters, another of the organising companies, auctions items of Star Trek memorabilia. Signed photographs of minor characters are snapped up for £35.

A DS9 chip, ‘screen used’ – in fact, a piece of plastic not much bigger than a cigarette lighter that once featured in Deep Space Nine – is available for £150.

A replica of a Communicator – Star Trek’s version of a mobile phone, from the Sixties, which looks just like a chunkier version of an actual Nineties mobile phone – fetches £350. It wasn’t actually used on screen. But it is signed by Shatner.

A Star Trek belt goes for £200. A model of the Enterprise, beautifully made by a contemporary artist, goes for £2,600. The fans’ appetite is insatiable.

Later, Joiner will say of the convention: ‘Sometimes I would just stop and take it in. I just… looked at it all. I knew in a couple of days it would all be gone.’

‘The internet brings fans together,’ says Dave Bradley.

‘That’s key. Who would have thought, 20 years ago, that Doctor Who would be so big in television – or that The Hobbit would be such a huge movie?’ Rob Nathan points out that a lot of sci-fi fans are avid collectors of memorabilia – and the internet has had a big effect on collecting.

Is that what gets these Trekkies going? Personally, I think it’s some kind of perfect recipe that the original writer, Gene Roddenberry, could never have dreamed of back in the Sixties.

The Spock fan club

It’s about the original fans, geeks in a time when astronauts were gunning for the Moon.

It’s about science being suddenly cool. It’s about the relationship between Spock, a super-geek, and Kirk, a geek’s idealised version of the popular guy who gets the girls; here, the popular guy respects the geek. That’s very important. It’s about women being respected, and also very sexy in their clingy, revealing costumes.

It’s about the show’s then ground-breaking racial mix.

As the Trekkie historian Michael Hemmingson points out in his excellent book Star Trek: A Post-Structural Critique Of The Original Series, when Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, considered leaving the show, no less than Martin Luther King persuaded her to stay; the casting of an African-American in a show like Star Trek was, he thought, vitally important.

When I leave, after the convention should have ended, people are still queuing for autographs, and for a seat on the bridge of the Enterprise.

They are still looking at trinkets and figurines and postcards. Spock’s pointy ears; Kirk’s half-smile.

A strange, clunky Western set in space, featuring a resourceful, slightly pompous guy and a super-geek with funny ears. It doesn’t sound like it would work.

But somehow, 42 years on, it still does.

Star Trek is about the original fans, geeks in a time when astronauts were gunning for the Moon. It's about science being suddenly cool. It's about the relationship between Spock and Kirk